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Monday, December 24, 2012

Review: Shoot to Thrill

Book Info: Genre: Mystery/Suspense/ThrillerReading Level: AdultRecommended for: Fans of the genre, fans of the seriesTrigger Warnings: Violence, hate crimes (including but not limited to against LGBT people)

Disclosure: I purchased this book for myself in hardcover shortly after its release. All opinions are my own.

Synopsis: It's eighty-five degrees in the shade when Minneapolis detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth pull into the MPD parking garage. They're driving a tricked-out Caddy, repossessed from a low-level drug dealer. It's not a Beemer or a Mercedes, but it's got GPS, air-conditioning, and power seats with more positions than the Kama Sutra.

Things are heating up inside the station-house, too. The bomb squad's off to investigate another suspicious package at the mall, and kids are beating the crap out of one another and posting it on YouTube. And before Magozzi and Rolseth can wish for a straight-on homicide, the call comes in: a floater.

Soon they're humping it along a derelict stretch of the Mississippi River, beyond the green places where families picnic and admire the views. They can see her- she looks like a bride in her white formal gown—face down, dead in the water. And so it begins.

Across town, Grace McBride's Monkeewrench crew—the computer geeks who, after making a fortune on games, are now helping the cops with anti-crime software—have been recruited by the FBI to investigate a series of murder videos posted on the Web. It's not long before Magozzi, Rolseth, and Monkeewrench discover the frightening link between the unlucky bride and the latest, most horrific use of the Internet to date. Using their skills to scour the Net in search of the perpetrator, the team must race against the clock to stop a killer in his tracks.

My Thoughts: This is book five in the series, after Snow Blind (review here where formatting allowed—please note it does include spoilers, but they have mostly been hidden under spoiler tags), and the first of the books I have not read previously.

Maybe it’s foolish to expect things like this not to sneak through, but honestly? G.P. Putnam & Sons should use spellcheck at the very least when they’re editing their books so that things like “dimljy” don’t sneak through, don’t you think? Although I have to give them props later for the proper use of “canvass” where too many people who aren’t aware of the difference use “canvas” to describe police going through a neighborhood to check whether people have noticed anything amiss. Also, that was the only mistake I found in the entire book (first sentence of the second chapter), so I guess I’ll let them off with a warning.

This book is not a true mystery, in that we know the names of at least a couple of the doers at the outset—so we watch as the good guys try to figure out who they are. But, of course, we don’t know the details, so there are plenty of bits to be learned as we go along. This is another book that deals with issues of people taking justice into their own hands, as well as some of the darker repercussions of the international community that is being created by the World Wide Web. A wonderful book, and I loved it, just like I’ve loved every book in this series. The epilogue almost made me lose my mind, so I’m jumping straight into Off the Grid to see if there are any more details, even though I have a short editing job to work on this week. I’ll bet I can get this puppy read in just a few hours if I hurry. Watch for that review!